Or dont do patents at all.
China is now starting to enforce IP rights because as they move up the industry maturity scale, the rights become more important.
IP rights only become relevant to developed nations, where manufacturing and other primary/secondary industries become less important than service industries.
There is no "global turning against protected invention".
There is "developing vs developed nations ongoing opposing interests".
But software is very different from medical patents.
That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.
That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.
Patents necessarily put more capital investments into patentable work than unpatentable work, but that doesnt mean it is more efficient. I understand the principle of patents, but eventually you end up in heavy interventionism, state funding, litigation, etc. Best to do away of all of that imo.
So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical).
Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways.
Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless you mean socializing drug discovery which would be a completely unproven way to develop drugs at scale.
It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.
I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.
The whole thing is a big lie.
End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.
I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”
Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.
I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.
One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.
And it currently costs billions of dollars to get FDA approval.
Basically assume I find a new antidepressant. I spend 2 billion dollars proving it's safe and effective.
How do I get my money back when any drug manufacturer can now manufacture the same drug?
I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.
On the patent side you have such modern marvels as OxyContin, which has arguably caused more loss of life than COVID-19.
Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_Unite...
The average Opiod death is 3x that by years alone, and more when going by expected healthspan.
Hence "loss of life" and not "deaths".
This number is impossibly wrong. There were 48 new drugs brought to market in 2019. At an average cost of 1 trillion dollar per drug would mean the entire economy of both the U.S. and Europe were devoted to drug research which just isn't true.
...opium and extracts for pain relief, cinchona bark for malaria, cloves and clove oil for oral pain relief, I could go on, but you could also Google this.
And the fact that a "patent medicine" is a synonym in history for "snake oil" shows how little scientific rigour patents brought to medicinal development, and how the patent system was initially co-opted to lend an air of legitimacy to quackery.
That's only if you look at how the system is today and evaluate as it is today.
Software mostly doesn't have patents: theres no patent to an uber, to a paypal, to an amazon. You would have a different business model to fund medical innovation, for example, advance payments from prospective patients.